


First Impressions

by themodlibrarian



Category: Rurouni Kenshin
Genre: Awkward Encounters, First Impressions, Ninja, Raising children, baby misao, oniwabanshu - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-10
Updated: 2017-10-16
Packaged: 2018-12-26 07:01:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 6,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12053769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themodlibrarian/pseuds/themodlibrarian
Summary: Each member of the Edo Oniwabanshu remembers meeting Makimachi Misao differently. Despite jealousy, hate and deception, she still managed to win their loyalty.





	1. Shikijō

**Author's Note:**

> I had every intention of rewriting this earlier in the year and posting it shortly after "Walking Along Roads Paved with Promise." But that didn't happen. Inspired by a lot of old fics from ff.net days: Hikaru-a, Shin Sankai, Silver Miko, Tiian, Ms. Western Ink and Nagia. Plus more. This is a part of a shortish series about where I just wrote about my cravings for Oniwaban interaction.

_Shikijō:._

“Is this a test?” Shikijō asked when Aoshi came into the dojo with Misao in his arms. 

Misao’s hair brushed against Aoshi’s face as she turned to look at Shikijō, bare chested at the middle of the room, hands curled into fists at his sides. She turned back, a hand curled around her mouth, and whispered into Aoshi’s ear. 

“This is Misao,” Aoshi said, bending down to give the child a shorter landing. She fell the short distance and pressed against the ground like a spider: knees bent out, hands balanced before her feet. 

Shikijō eyed her, looking over her tiny, lithe frame with a caution meant for a figure cutting perhaps a more intimidating shadow. 

“And what brings Misao to the dojo?” he asked. He took a step back when Misao stood up, eyes bright in the noonday sun shining in through the open doors leading out into the garden.

“Shikijō,” Aoshi said, tilting his head, hand going round Misao’s narrow shoulders. “Are you afraid of Misao?”

A giggle burst from the girl’s mouth, but she clamped her hands across her face. Her eyes sparkled. If Shikijō looked carefully, he would have seen Aoshi flash a ghost of a smile. 

“No,” Shikijō said, considering the weight of his words as he spoke them. “I’m only puzzled as to why there is now a little girl in the dojo.”

The good humor from Misao’s face vanished. Shikijō watched them cock their heads in eerie coordination. 

“When I told Misao how we have gained a new member of the Oniwabanshū,” Aoshi said. “She wanted to meet you.”

“What’s wrong with your face?” Misao asked, touching her fingers to the bridge of her nose.

Shikijō looked down at her. He looked down at both of them. At two children looking him over with critical eyes, when it really came down to it. 

“Shikijō tried to get into Edo Castle for the other side,” Aoshi said. “I stopped him.”

Shikijō flinched. “Should you tell her things like that?” 

Aoshi shrugged and looked past Shikijō’s shoulder toward the garden. “I have no reason to tell her lies,” he said. “Hannya tells me your form is improving. Before dinner, I’d like to see where you stand.”

Before he could respond, Misao gave a delighted shriek and charged toward Shikijō, sliding under his legs on her knees across the dojo to throw herself into the striped arms of the strange boy with the strange face. 

Hannya stumbled a few steps back and caught the girl, giving a rare laugh. 

Aoshi touched his hand to Shikijō’s elbow. “You have a few hours yet. Ask Hannya if there’s anything you’re unsure of.”

Hannya, with his mismatched eyes and narrow face, passed Misao from his arms back into Aoshi’s. Shikijō watched as Misao took a handful of Hannya’s sparse hair to turn his face to hers for a kiss. 

It was strange to see such gentleness in this web of ruthlessness and secrecy: children trapped in a game of war yet still doing better than himself in both victory and the whims of life. 

Hannya stood in front of him before he recognized motion. 

“Aoshi said he wants us to go over your form,” Hannya said. His voice still had the boyish smoothness of the young.

“Yeah.” Shikijō blinked into the dimming twilight at Aoshi’s retreat, Misao twining her hands through his long hair, her voice carrying in tones across the yard.

Hannya chuckled. “You’ve met Misao-sama,” he said. 

Shikijō made a face, though not an unkind one. “Apparently she wanted to meet me.”

Hannya smiled. “She feels it is her duty to meet new Oniwabanshū and welcome them.”

“She’s much too young to be hanging around,” Shikijō said. “What is it with everyone around here being so _young_.”

Hannya cocked his head. Shikijō imagined if Aoshi and Misao were still in the room, the synchronization would have been the same. “She might be young,” he said. “But it is her duty. Or it will be in the future.”

Shikijō frowned. “What are you talking about?”

Hannya motioned out the doors. Aoshi and Misao were gone, but the wind through the leaves mimicked Misao’s distant voice. 

“Misao is the Okashira’s granddaughter,” he said. “When you become Oniwabanshū, you become part of the family any of us has ever known.”


	2. Aoshi

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short, but much like Aoshi, not much to say. Or perhaps, actions speak louder than words? I'm grasping for straws.

_Aoshi:._

The first time Aoshi sees Misao curving her hand around her mouth to whisper into Hannya’s ear, it catches him off guard. Lightning fear and biting anger strike through the bottom of his stomach and down the length of his spine, but he grasps at sense and moves away from the scene. 

Although never said in any explicit terms, Oniwabanshū orphans owned little but what skills they learned or loyalty they earned. 

Perhaps, from Kashiwazaki Nenji’s special interest and the _Okashira’s_ unfounded favoritism, Aoshi had grown arrogant and thought he owned more than he did. 

Like Makimachi Misao’s secrets and unwavering adoration. 

He was barely eleven the first time someone put her into his arms. 

It was an evening of turmoil and uncertainties: an attack on their home by unknown assailants while the Okashira visited. 

Misao fit against him like a doll: tiny and docile, arms winding around his neck, cheek touching the skin at the hollow of his throat. 

“Protect Misao,” a woman shouted at him, rushing around a corner as she pulled a handful of knives out from her unassuming yukata. 

Aoshi took in the smoke, the patter of feet, the sounds of metal on metal and took Misao with him to the well. They floated ten feet down for a good part of the evening with Aoshi whispering snippets of stories into her ear whenever she fussed. 

The moon hung high in the west and Aoshi was beginning to feel the weight of Misao and the weight of the water and the unyielding hardness of the stones when he felt Misao’s lips at his ear. 

“Name?” she said, the word rough on her tongue. 

It took him a moment to recognize her request. 

“Aoshi,” he said. 

“A-oe-sh,” she said, voice echoing in the well. 

Aoshi put a finger over his lips and Misao clamped both hands over her mouth. Her eyes, blue and green and as bright as stars in her thin face, sparkled like the water around them. 

She curled her hand around her mouth and leaned against him to press her lips to his ear. 

“A-oe-sh,” she said again, in a loud whisper. 

Clouds blew past the moon and Aoshi could see how she smiled. Suddenly, the command to protect her was not so much a command anymore.


	3. Hyottoko

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My favorite, I think. Thanks for reading!

_Hyottoko:._

Of course, Hyottoko had seen Misao running around before, whether tearing through a camp with stolen dumplings between her hands or sliding against wood floors on her stomach to escape the half-hearted aggravation of the latest victim to one of her pranks. 

He’d seen her on Shikijō’s shoulder, from over Hannya’s back and, on occasion, enveloped in Aoshi’s embrace with tears on her cheeks. 

When Aoshi became Okashira, he saw more of the child than he would have liked. 

Once, she climbed out the kitchen window with a bowl of ume between her hands. They’d stared at one another with him wondering if he should tell her to put it back and her observing his wide, bulky frame with the careful travel of her bright eyes. 

With the quick startled jerk of her head to the sounds he could not pick up from behind her, she shoved the bowl at him and darted away through the long grass.

A young woman burst out from behind the shoji and exclaimed her displeasure at the bowl in his hands with a toss of a slop bucket in his direction. 

After that, Hyottoko decided he did not like Misao. 

Shikijō laughed when Hyottoko told him of the incident. 

“She likes to cause trouble,” he’d said. “Don’t take it personally.”

But Hyottoko did. Especially when she called him “Fatso” after he tried to get her to stop stealing food from the kitchen. 

The men and women in the kitchen seemed to think he was getting Misao to steal food for him. Such a tiny girl couldn’t possibly be eating it all on her own.

Hyottoko was sick of it all very quickly. 

When he caught her again, he chased her back inside the kitchen, but she was nimble and tiny and climbed shelves and fit between spaces he couldn’t reach. In the end, they knocked over preparations for dinner. 

The humiliation he felt at being called into the Okashira’s office following the incident bordered on rage and hate for the little girl who seemed to sense this and stuck very close to others for the rest of the day. 

“There are stories of you chasing Misao through the kitchens and destroying preparations for dinner,” Aoshi said, looking down at papers strewn across his desk. 

There were bags under his eyes with gentle bruising. Hyottoko thought for a moment that he would throw up from shame for disturbing the young Okashira with such a trivial matter. 

“I am at your mercy, Okashira,” Hyottoko said, bowing. 

Aoshi sighed and Hyottoko peered up at him. 

“Go to town and buy new supplies,” he said. “You’ll be responsible for dinner tonight and the rest of the week.”

Hyottoko nodded. The punishment was nothing for the trouble he helped to cause. When he made to stand, Aoshi reached out a hand to give him pause. With his hair down, he looked as young as Hyottoko sometimes forgot he was. There was a strange quirk to his mouth that made him appear even younger.

“Also, take Misao with you,” he said. “I know she caused more of the trouble than anyone will let on.”

The reflex urge to ask Aoshi to reconsider stopped at the middle of Hyottoko’s throat. He swallowed his protest and left to find Misao waiting for him just outside the door. 

Much to his surprise, Misao behaved herself for the duration of the shopping, pointing out some materials he’d forgotten as they moved past stalls. 

She even helped him in the kitchen, quiet and reserved with uncharacteristic seriousness that made him wary and careful for any hidden tricks. 

Once, Hannya stopped in to check on them and Misao broke into a bright smile that Hyottoko realized he had never seen up close. The smile dazzled and made him look twice: for once, she didn’t seem the terror he’d come to know her as, but instead, perhaps, the girl so many spoke so fondly for.

For it, he pretended not to see Misao shove a bowl of peaches into Hannya’s waiting hands.

They worked in silence together for the rest of the week, preparing simple rice dishes and bowls of plain soba and onigiri. Before the week was out, one of the women who usually worked in the kitchen, ushered them out, claiming she needed some variety-- and that she hoped they had learned their lesson. 

There was flour on Misao’s cheek and a damp spot against the front of her shirt as they left the kitchen together. When they reached the hall to lead either to the dojo or the lounge, Misao turned to him and bowed, her short braid falling over her shoulder.

“Thank you very much for allowing me to help you, Hyottoko-san,” she said. “I am sorry for the trouble I have caused.”

Then, like a bird, she darted down the hall and disappeared around a corner. 

That evening, after a meal of complex materials Hyottoko could not begin to sort in his head, he entered his room to find a package wrapped in cloth on top of his futon. Inside, clumsily made sweets spilled into his hands along with a note scrawled in Misao’s hand.

“I made them for you.” 

Hyottoko started at the sound. Misao crouched against the frame of his open window. She smiled when he looked up. 

“You shouldn’t climb through other people’s windows,” he said. 

She shrugged and sat down, legs swinging with her heels tapping against the wall. She motioned toward the sweets.

“Won’t you try them?”

He did. They were sticky and hard to chew, but surprisingly not bad. 

“What do you want?” he asked, eyeing the mischievous smile. 

“Your soul.”

“What?”

She laughed and her eyes sparkled in the moonlight. “I want to be friends,” she said, then smiled sheepishly. “I haven’t been very nice to you. So I’m here to say I’m sorry and offer you peace.”

He looked down at the sweets shaped like little flowers in his palm. “Okay,” he said. Then looked back up at her.

When she gave him the smile she gave Hannya, he thought that perhaps, like the sweets, she wasn’t so bad.


	4. Beshimi

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The most difficult to write. I was on a roll before I hit this chapter. It still doesn't quite sit well with me, but it'll do.  
> Also, I'd noticed in older fics how young Misao was always written as extremely childish. I'd never quite liked it, but I think I made Misao much more mature than her age would allow. Alas.

_Beshimi:._

Beshimi gauged Misao’s importance the instant he met her and tried to use it to his advantage.

He offered to play games with her, volunteered to show her how to use a basic weapon, shared with her little observations about their company that made her giggle.

  
But, no matter how he tried, he could not seem to enter the small inner circle of the warriors who so stood in Misao’s good graces-- among them even the Okashira.

  
With calculating glances and subtle scrutiny, he watched for a week as Misao wrapped her arms around the Okashira’s neck, saw her stop the giant Shikijō in his tracks with a tug of his hand, noticed how both men and women throughout the post stopped to tell her hello or kneel down to speak with her.

“Misao-chan,” he said, one morning out by the training grounds. He sat against some stones, half watching the way she practiced throwing dull knives at a wooden stake.

She turned to look at him, her disgruntled expression at constant misses part of her answer.

“How is it that you know the Okashira so well?” he asked.

Misao raised an eyebrow in confusion, though her face brightened. “Aoshi-sama?” she said, then shrugged. “I’ve always known him.”

She twisted and threw another knife at the stake. She missed. The knife struck the grass. Beshimi pointed to her arm.

“You’re throwing too late,” he said. “Let go of the knife before it passes your elbow.”

Misao looked at him with her upper lip slightly curled. He forgot sometimes, with a start, that she was really rather young. She hurried to the post and picked up the knives and carried them back to his feet, holding one out.

“Show me,” she said.

He stood beside her, towering over her the way everyone else towered over him. The knife left his hand with a flick and struck the wood. Misao clapped then picked up another one, handing it to him and taking another for herself.

She mimicked his stance and looked at him.

Despite her age, Beshimi realized, she was actually rather clever.

He drew his arm back. She followed. He flicked the knife forward. Both struck the post.

“Yes!” Misao shouted, hopping up and down, that brilliant smile he saw often directed at others making her eyes bright.

Beshimi chuckled and sat back down against the stones. Misao picked up several more knives and repeated the motions he walked her through.

Movement through the trees caught his attention. Just a short distance off, the masked one, Hannya, walked toward the training ground with several new recruits.

Beshimi waved to Misao.

“We should get going,” he said. “Ugly is coming to train.”

Misao looked at him sharply, her large eyes and small features closing up over a mask of tension as Hannya came into view. She laid the knives down in front of Beshimi and wiped her hands against the front of her pants.

“That’s not very nice, Beshimi,” she said.

Beshimi blinked and frowned, looking from her to Hannya. He tried to grin and coax a giggle from her. “You have to admit, under that thing, he is _very_ ugly.”

She shook her head and stepped away from him to hurry toward Hannya, who tilted his head as he caught sight of her. She jumped into his arms and hugged him, patting the side of his head, before jumping back down and hurrying away through the trees and back toward the headquarters.

Beshimi couldn’t find her for a week.

When he finally did, she was curled in the crook of Hyottoko’s arm on the steps leading out into the garden. He glowered at the casual way the fire breather held Misao in the dusk.

“Hey, Shorty,” Hyottoko said.

Beshimi bristled. “Fatso,” he said.

Hyottoko chuckled.

Beshimi motioned to Misao. “I’ve been looking for her,” he said. “Where’s she been?”

Hyottoko raised an eyebrow. “Here,” he said. “There. Around. If you couldn’t find her, you must have done something.”

“I taught her how to throw knives!”

Hyottoko face dropped and his eyes widened. “That was _you_?” he said. “She’s been causing trouble all over for those things. Even asked if she could get a set of her own. You do realize that she’s _five_ , yes?”

Beshimi shrugged and sat down on the step. “She took to it.”

Hyottoko hummed. “That’s something the Okashira would say.”

“What do you mean?” Beshimi asked, looking up sharply.

Hyottoko waved a hand around the yard. “Many around here baby her. They think that because she's a child and because she is a Makimachi, they need to be careful around her. So they won’t scold her when she causes trouble, they’re afraid to tell her no and they won’t let her do anything that could be perceived as dangerous.”

Beshimi looked back at Misao, dark lashes like half moons against the tops of her cheeks. “I didn’t know she was a Makimachi,” he said. “That does make sense though. How everyone treats her. And how she knows the Okashira so well.”

“Don’t let Hannya know you were the one who taught her.”

“Why? What's Ugly going to do?”

Hyottoko glanced at him, a slight frown turning his beady eyes down at the middle.

“Well, for one, none of us are stupid. We know what you're trying to do with your hanging around Misao. While the ambition is admirable, Misao is more than a key to a secret room.”

Hyottoko moved to scratch at the side of his jaw. Misao stirred in her sleep and shuddered a sigh.

“Two, if you talk the way you do about Hannya around Misao, you’ll only get so far. She’s very smart, as I’m sure you noticed from teaching her to throw knives. You’re using her to gain the Okashira’s favor? Well, she’ll use you to keep learning dangerous things no one else will teach her. Only difference is she’s got all the gain.”

Beshimi looked up at the sky as a murder of crows burst from just above the line of trees. The evenings were cooler with faint breezes bringing in the promise of autumn.

“There is so much I wish to offer the Okashira and the Oniwabanshū,” he said. “I need only the opportunity. I thought she might be that opportunity.”

“Think of her first as a little girl,” Hyottoko said, “whose heart you must win over, if you’re so set on it. Treat her like a tool and she can feel the difference.”

Beshimi ran into Misao again a few days later as she followed Hannya into the dojo, presumably for training. Though his expression was covered, Beshimi could feel Hannya’s disdain as he knelt beside the child.

“I was in the armory,” Beshimi began, pulling a folded cloth from a sleeve. “And I found these. They’re a little old, I think but a good size for your hands. If you’d like I can show you how to use them. I heard rumors that you were asking for a set of knives for yourself.”

Hannya laid a heavy hand over Beshimi’s shoulder. “Thank you, Beshimi-san, for your consideration,” he said in his deep, musical voice. “But Misao-sama’s training falls to me.”

Misao waved at Hannya, turning one of the kunai over in her hands, mindful of the sharp edges against her fingers. “But would you teach me to use these, Hannya-kun,” she said.

Hannya hesitated. “If the Okashira permits it.”

Misao shook her head and smiled. It was a sad sort of smile though, one of which Beshimi had yet, at that point, to see. She always seemed so full of joy that to consider the idea that she could also harbor sadness, struck him as strange.

“If I could offer a suggestion,” Beshimi said, glancing at Hannya. “Perhaps if I taught her while you observed, or kept watch, to make sure that nothing goes wrong… then I would be the one to fall to trouble if the Okashira does not approve of her learning.”

“And if I’m observing, how could I also not fall to trouble?” Hannya said.

Beshimi smiled. “I always could teach her again in secret. Although if you’re so determined that her training fall to you, I imagine that you’d be more comfortable being aware of it this time.”

Misao threw one of the kunai between them. It struck the frame of the doorway leading into the dojo. Hannya grasped the handle and pulled it out. He handed it back to Beshimi.

“This is my time with her,” he said. “You can have her in the early evening if Aoshi does not claim her first.”

The knives were still big for her hands, but she dealt with them better than perhaps Beshimi could have predicted. With time, her hands would grow. He would be curious to see what she could do in perhaps another ten years.

“Thank you,” she said, suddenly, after an early evening session. She’d cut three of her fingers during the hour and Beshimi tried to wrap them as best he could, but the Okashira was bound to notice.

“It’s a pleasure, Misao-chan,” he said, smiling briefly.

He made to start walking back, but she grabbed his sleeve.

“No,” she said. “Thank you. For teaching me something no one else would.” She tilted her head back and the setting sun passed gold light over her face. “You treat me less like a doll and more like an onmitsu. I like that.”

Beshimi knelt before her, still a head taller, but she didn’t need to crane her neck so far back. She was smiling, but there was pride in her face and in the set of her shoulders. Knowing that he’d helped put it there then gave him more a feeling of purpose and accomplishment than he thought he could ever have achieved outside a battlefield.


	5. Hannya

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another one that proved difficult, and yet rewarding once it finished. In my mind, Hannya is a lot more sassy than perhaps he might have been.

_Hannya:._

It took Hannya almost a year to agree to come down from the mountain. When they arrived at the base, he took to the shadows, watching those that would become his comrades and always keeping close to Aoshi.

“Nenji-san does not like you following him around,” Aoshi said as winter began to set in.

Hannya was glad to have a roof over his head this year. He handed Aoshi a jumble of papers he had dropped behind him in a trail.

“He frequents a brothel in town,” Hannya said. “Of course he doesn’t.”

“Regardless,” Aoshi said, but he made a careless gesture over his shoulder and straightened a stack on a desk in an empty room.

Hannya considered him a moment, watching the weariness in the set of Aoshi’s shoulders.

“They’re sending him to Kyoto,” he said. “To head an undercover headquarters. In the form of an inn.”

Aoshi seemed to lose balance against the desk. “You can’t _spy_ on the Okashira’s meetings,” he said.

Hannya raised an eyebrow. “Why not?” he asked. “It is part of my duty.”

“ _For_ us, not--” Aoshi stopped and sighed.

Hannya tilted his head, peering at Aoshi through uneven eyes, making note of the red skin beneath his eyes and the downward tilt of his mouth. Though Hannya knew Aoshi was not partial to smiling, he also knew Aoshi was not prone to frown.

“Does something bother you?” Hannya asked.

Aoshi left the room. Hannya followed.

“Do you perhaps feel the absence of the girl?”

Aoshi stopped. He looked at Hannya over his shoulder, blue eyes bright in the dying daylight. “What girl?”

Hannya shrugged. “I’ve heard the women talk about a girl you’re very fond of,” he said. “They make comments about how one day she might be your bride.”

Aoshi winced and continued down the hall. “We’re both too young to be considering marriage.”

Hannya kept to the shadows, close to the doors, following him into the garden. “She is important though.”

“Aa,” Aoshi said, stepping down into the courtyard to meet Nenji, who scowled when he saw Hannya. “I’ll see you at dinner. Nenji-san expects an apology.”

Before Nenji’s departure to Kyoto to begin overseeing the Okashira’s plans for “Aoi-Ya,” he and Hannya exchanged words that proved uncomfortable with both of them. Particularly when Hannya listed off facts as to why Nenji might require an apology-- and for which reasons Hannya would give it.

The fact that Nenji was Aoshi’s master seemed to matter little to Hannya at times.

“Take this,” Nenji told him on the morning of his trip.

He thrust a white demon mask into Hannya’s hands. Hannya stared at the gold teeth and horns and the half moon slits for eyes.

“Like your namesake,” he added, pulling a bag over his shoulder. “Aoshi made mention that when he first found you, you’d looked like a demon thrust from the shadows.”

As Nenji left the main hall, Hannya called after him, “Going by masks-- if I am Hannya, you must be Okina.”

While Hannya did notice a visible relief wash Aoshi of his former irritability once the Okashira arrived back at the base, the new bustle of activity and unfamiliar weight of the porcelain mask kept Hannya from following as close to Aoshi as he usually did.

Despite only a few missed hours a day, or even a day or two a week, by the time Hannya caught up, he found Aoshi thoroughly distracted by the girl Hannya had heard so much about.

She was a tiny thing with hair falling to the middle of her back, fitted into a child’s kimono of purple and red. Given what he had heard, Hannya thought that she might have been older.

From bare tree branches and shadowed corners, he watched Aoshi fold paper cranes for her and how she delighted more in the process than the actual product. He marveled at how unafraid the girl was to touch Aoshi, making Hannya see, perhaps for the first time, how young his master really was.

“You really are quite fond of her,” Hannya said to him in passing.

Aoshi had stiffened, but otherwise did not reply.

Hannya did not actually meet the girl until almost the end of her visit. On one of those rare moments where he walked the halls, tired from training, weary from having to make nice with the others, he turned a corner and found her.

Someone had braided her hair and the end hung over her shoulder, tip tickling the line of her jaw. Her eyes, a luminous color of clear skies, the likes of which Hannya avoided, preferring the company of the night, watched him with a critical glare suited more for someone much older than she.

“You are Makimachi-sama?” Hannya said, deciding courtesy in honor of Aoshi’s admiration should be his course of action.

She nodded. “You?”

Despite a general lack of tact stemming more from a dislike of veiled speaking than any type of misunderstanding of decorum, Hannya knelt in front of the girl in an attempt to indulge her.

“I am Hannya,” he said. “A servant to Aoshi-sama.”

She blinked, like she was sleepy, which she very well could have been. The sun at Hannya’s back dipped low behind the building.

“Aoshi-sama has no servants,” she said and rubbed at her nose with the sleeve of her kimono. She garbled her words and Hannya had to consider them a touch longer before understanding.

“Then what am I?”

She sniffled and tilted her head toward her shoulder. “Our newest brother,” she said, then moved forward until her arms were around his shoulders, her face pressed to his neck. “Aoshi-sama was too busy for me today. Mm tired. Will you take me to my room?”

Hannya held his arms out, unsure of whether to cage them around her tiny body or push her away. He settled on supporting her weight and standing, overly conscious of her warmth against him and the feel of her breath, puffing in small bursts, through the cloth at his chest. Of course, he knew the way to her room but wondered if Aoshi would find it acceptable that he knew.

In the end, he decided it was less appropriate to stand in the middle of the hall as night made the fading autumn cooler.

“Since Aoshi-sama was busy,” Hannya tried after a moment’s silence, “what did you do all day?”

She shrugged. Hannya felt her eyelashes brush his collarbone just as she said something that sounded like— _kaha? Kafa? Hata?_

“Aoshi-sama taught you to train?” he asked, the word— _kata_ — clicking in his head.

“Oji-san,” she said into his shoulder. He slipped open the door to her room just as Aoshi rounded the corner, out of breath, usually stoic countenance flustered.

They stared at one another for a moment before Misao lifted her head and turned, looking at Aoshi and merely smiling before settling back against Hannya’s shoulder.

“I can take it from here,” Aoshi said, voice low and his expression oddly closed. Hannya watched his face as he made to relinquish his hold on the child— when she grabbed at the front of his uniform.

Aoshi’s face closed even more and Hannya felt a strange anxiety climb up the middle of his chest and settle at the bottom of his throat. At the same time, the girl’s warmth in his arms calmed his mind and he thought that if he had to stand outside with her all night, he would not mind.

“If you do not mind, Aoshi-sama,” Hannya began, he shifted her in his grasp and moved the porcelain mask aside to feel the night air on his face.

Aoshi moved into the room and fussed in the corner, unrolling a futon and adjusting blankets as Hannya knelt down and lowered Misao down. He could see the sliver of her eyes in the dim light, her tiny fist still clutching at his shirt. But then, as they focused on his face, they opened and Hannya, never before self-conscious about his disfigurement, wished he had not moved the mask in the first place.

“Name?” she said, patting his cheek. “Hana?”

From the other side of the futon, Aoshi knelt frozen, half pulling up the blankets, eyes focused on her face, half turned from him.

Hannya swallowed. “Hannya,” he said.

“Hannya,” she said and smiled, grabbing his hand and turning on her side to fall asleep.

Hannya could feel Aoshi’s eyes on him, but from all the eggshell, forced, difficult moments and conversations in trying to properly find his place at Aoshi’s side, the little girl with her sleepy smile gave him the sort of welcome he never thought he needed.

If she would allow it, he would pledge his life to her.

To Aoshi, he gave his loyalty, his trust, his future.

To Misao, he would give his kindness, his patience, his friendship.

If they would both accept him, he hoped to be considered one among their growing family.


	6. Okina

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fin. Thank you for reading until the end, if you've made it here.

_Okina:._

  
When Aoshi first slipped and called him Okina, the name felt natural, as if everyone had always called him that and not only recently and behind his back.

“So you, too,” he had said, sighing and sitting against a boulder.

To his credit, the boy appeared chastised. “I’m sorry, Nenji-san,” he said, bowing low and holding it.

Nenji rolled his eyes. “Please,” he said. “I have no illusions. I know everyone calls me that now. Thanks to your wild friend.”

“It amuses Hannya,” Aoshi said, words slow, gaze directed at his feet.

“And that boy seems to have had few amusements in his young life,” he said. “Let him have this one.”

While Hannya may have once had few amusements, Nenji found that those amusements grew in number in a short course of time-- with often himself on the receiving end.

After the war, he did not see Hannya or Aoshi for some time. Though he worried, as even surrogate parents are wont to do, he knew that eventually, they might travel to Kyoto and thus kept the Aoi-Ya as a place for uncertain Oniwabanshu to meditate on the new era.

Three years into Meiji’s new world, Nenji crossed paths with a young girl in a poorly tied yukata and pink obi. The girl stared at him as they passed one another, bright eyes trying, it seemed, to memorize his face.

Just a handful of years before, those sorts of serious, clever children would have been both useful to his cause and unsettling for an enemy.

But with the new peace and the Tanabata Festival fast approaching, there was no need for children like that. Unless--

Nenji turned back around, scanning the street for the child, for demons masks or anything that might feed the fire of hope suddenly burning in his chest.

“You have visitors,” Ochika said when Nenji returned to Aoi-Ya. “They await you in the garden.”

“Visitors?” he asked, still standing in the entrance hall. “Or boarders?”

Ochika smiled. “More like,” she said with a strange smile. “Old friends.”

Shikijō was the first to greet him just outside the shoji leading into the garden.

“Kashiwazaki-san,” he said, inclining his head, always polite. Out of all of them, always the most respectful. Nenji sometimes thought it had to do with the fact that he was a traitor, feeling perhaps that he did not completely belong, even after so long.

Nenji laid a heavy hand on his shoulder and turned the corner.

Aoshi was seated on a bench, hands clasped between his knees, looking up at the sky, Beshimi at his feet. Hyottoko watched from beneath a great tree, how Hannya moved through a series of slow flowing movements with a shinai.

“Aoshi,” Nenji called.

Beshimi looked up first and stood. Hannya completed the end of the form and turned. It was then that Nenji noticed the child, the same one from the square earlier that morning. Aoshi followed his eyes and reached around Hannya to touch the girl’s shoulder.

“Okina,” he said, rising. The girl’s eyes darted to Nenji and she covered a smile with her hands. “You remember Misao, I’m sure.”

Nenji leaned forward. “ _Makimachi_ Misao?” he said, half playful, half genuinely surprised. The child eyed him with distrust then, clutching the shinai in her hands. “That can’t be,” Nenji continued. “This girl is much too pretty and much too old! The Misao I remember cannot have been more than five-years-old.”

“Don’t call me pretty,” she said, scowling. She stepped out from Hannya’s shadow, but closer into Aoshi’s side.

Pretty, Nenji decided, might have been pushing it. Striking, seemed more the word, with her big eyes and coil of long, dark hair falling over one shoulder. No doubt as she got older, she would fall into the realm of pretty. But in that dirty, poorly put together yukata and the mischievous insolence of the young-- it was obvious that she needed a woman’s touch in order to ever achieve that possibility.

“We’ve just come from a trip in Nagoya,” Aoshi said. “We’ve heard good things about these lodgings and thought we would stay for a while.”

Nenji heard the humor in Aoshi’s voice first. Then realized how tall he had grown in the years since he last saw him. Nenji suddenly felt very old. He walked closer to them, half acknowledging Shikijō move past him to stand beside Hyottoko. They chuckled at Aoshi’s joke as Hannya knelt down beside the girl to whisper into her ear.

“Of course.” Nenji smiled. “I’ll have rooms set up for you. Do you know yet how long you will be staying?”

Aoshi shook his head. Hannya lifted the girl in his arms. She was too big to be carried, Nenji thought. Although, by the way she struggled in Hannya’s grasp to get down, she thought so too. She was, however, he noticed, very small for her age.

“I’ll have baths drawn for you,” Nenji continued. “No doubt the pretty Misao needs one quite badly. Really, don’t any of you know how to properly dress the girl?”

Each of the men froze and exchanged looks. The girl rolled her eyes. Hannya took her hand.

“We’ve been busy,” Beshimi said. “With other things.”

“I got an oiran to show me how to wear a yukata,” the girl said. “Usually I wear a jinbei. It’s easier. But Hannya-kun said I should dress presentably for this new trip.”

Nenji raised an eyebrow. “And how,” he said, “did she find an oiran to teach her?”

Hannya tensed. “You’re one to talk,” he said, just as Aoshi said, “Business.”

The girl, seeming to realize she caused a little trouble for her companions, smirked and folded her hands in front of her, shinai pointed at the ground.

Nenji bent down to peer into her face. There was a yellowing bruise on her jaw and a healing cut that arched from her temple to the top of her cheekbone. Looking at all of the men, however, each of them seemed rumpled and tired with healing wounds wrapped in soiled bandages.

Aoshi even moved with a stiffness that suggested he had suffered an abdominal injury. Whatever their last trip had been, it might have been enough to send them to familiar territory. If not for their own sakes, then for the little girl with the mischievous smile.

Nenji smiled at the girl and dropped a hand on top of her head. He last saw her at the funeral of the former Okashira and immediate induction of Aoshi. She had been quiet then and serious, almost, he had thought, like Aoshi.

But then, during the subsequent celebration, Aoshi had lifted her into his arms and she broke out into a smile that had given Nenji unexpected pause in conversation.

“I am Kashiwazaki Nenji,” he said, moving to tilt her face up by the chin. “It is a pleasure, Misao, to finally meet you.”

Misao held his gaze with an intensity of one who thought she had little to fear. “I’ve heard others call you Okina,” she said.

“An unfortunate occurrence,” he said, glancing at Hannya, who pointedly looked away.

Misao tugged the end of his curling beard, grinning in a way that made Shikijō and Hyottoko tense, meaning trouble. “I think I’ll call you Jiya.”

Shikijō swept her up then and hurried out of the garden as Beshimi sputtered between where Misao once stood and Nenji.

“She--she does that,” he tried to explain. He, at least, was familiar enough with Nenji to remember the horrors that once made him feared and renowned.

“For a solid six months,” Hyottoko added. “I was known as _Fatso_.”

“You’re _still_ known as Fatso.”

To Nenji’s left, Hannya lifted up his mask and pushed it to the side. He rubbed at his ruined face and seemed to laugh even as he sighed.

Despite somewhat bruised pride that lingered for the few weeks that Aoshi and his men stayed at Aoi-Ya, Nenji could not help but soften at Misao’s quirks and even her new name for him.

When Aoshi and the others left her in his care and Nenji had to watch her sit by the window, the bright smile gone, knees pressed to her chest, he could feel his own heart bleed.


End file.
